Conversation with Intrapreneurs: 1. Joseph Wortmann

I got an opportunity to talk to a great guy Joseph Wortmann (check his LinkedIN profile here). Joseph started as a software engineer at Macess and went on to found a company Comframe that started by developing a clinical image viewing system. Comframe has now over 100 employees and partners with organizations like Microsoft and IBM in developing quality imaging software. He also founded Emageon, serves on the board of Iron door company, and runs a management consultant firm. His diverse and successful career is an inspiration to several wannabe intrapreneurs. Joseph is an example of innovating inside a corporation and continuing the successful trend to start entrepreneurial ventures.

The Biggest Thing you learned?
People are the most important. One should truly understand and work with them. Understand their motivations and desires. Intra (or entre)preneurship is a sales job more than technical appeal to their interests.

Which is harder – Intrapreneurship or Entrepreneurship?
Intrapreneurship is sometimes harder than entrepreneurship. As an entrepreneur, if people turn you down, it is OK. You can pitch your idea to ten others. You have a greater degree of failure freedom. You are your own master and your ideas fail only because of you. Inside a corporation, people can kill your idea if you are not politically savvy. Inside a corporation, you have to learn persuasion and knack of selling yourself.

Importance of prototyping?
Critical! Prototyping, getting traction and support are very important. Executives don’t make immediate decisions when you present your idea. They will call the people they trust. You’ve to gain the trust of these trustees.

Biggest Advise
Don’t give up. There will be initial resistance, a tribal resistance. First No’s are very common. Find a way to re-approach. Be persistent.

Thanks Joseph for the time and valuable advise. Going back to my previous posts on achieving excellence (manifesto) and prototyping, Joe’s words reemphasize this. An idea without a prototype is not effective. Learn the art of woo (read the book by the same name by Shell and Moussa). This will help you get across a lot of hurdles.

Email Guidelines?

Recently, we got a huge circulation email suggesting email usage. We were told to think before we email and respond only if it was important, etc. The idea was that the senior guys were getting slammed with hundreds of emails. This is true in any organization. Even more if you have done your duties at the beginner level and moved up as a manager.

I think emails cause productivity hit. These are the obvious problems I see:

1. Context switching between work and email checking and work is not easy.
2. Usually one is on CC for more than half the emails they get. This means it is not important for you to take action. Why the hell do we need to check it then?
3. Emails are the portals for unimportant things to sneak through and disturb the daily routine.
4. Emails are parasites that slowly eat away 1/4th of your day without even you realizing.

That is one reason, I started the twice a day email checking policy. But, it is difficult. It is like Murphy’s law. Once I stopped checking emails, I started receiving phone calls about if I checked my email. But now it is not that bad. Things are slowly getting better for me. Two email checks a day at 12 and 5pm is sufficient to filter out most of unimportant issues or the issues that get resolved without me even having to take a look.

Visual Resumes find a new home

Excuse this post as this is not directly related to intrapreneurship.
In the middle of my intrapreneurship experiences, I have started a website http://visualresume.net. I have been receiving great responses to my visual resume, and I feel that this may open up new ways of personal branding. This website will host all the visual resumes and feature the best ones on the homepage. I am hoping this will bring out several cool and creative ways of personal representation out in the open. Please feel free to join the fun ride.

Prototyping

In my earlier post I touched the importance of prototyping. This topic deserves a full post if not a full book. The only way to get an idea executed is to build it and show it in operation. Like Steve Jobs says, if you want something, then you have to go and build it.

When you propose a raw idea three things can happen: Your boss gets excited and asks you to go and build it, or your boss does not approve of it and you still decide to go and build it, or your boss does not approve it and you drop it. If you are the third kind, you can stop reading. Else, in the first two cases, you are anyway going to develop the idea and hence, there is no point in advertising it upfront.

Talk about your ideas only when it is ready for people to use. As I mentioned previously, an idea has to be in digestible form, which is a prototype. You have to introspect and make sure that your idea is worth pursuing, then pursue it for a while in your cubicle or office. Show how it needs to be done. Once it is ready, launch it!

This presentation talks about this.

Find friends

Is is very important to find friends inside the system. If you are in the middle of executing your project, the last thing you want is visibility! I was lucky that I got the support of two of my friends. One was also a mentor (who luckily become my manager). Lot of times, he shielded me from “bad” things. I was very lucky in that regard.

Friends are important. Do not gossip with them if you can help it, but offer and seek professional help. Strengthen your bond by offering help even when they don’t ask for it. This is a simple rule that has been mentioned in several places numerous times and it still is ever-green.

Sirius Black as an Intrapreneur

I was watching “Harry Potter 3″ the other day and it struck me that Sirius Black possessed several qualities similar to what an intrapreneur needs. In the risk of stretching my imagination, I am going to draw analogies.

If Azkaban is the big corporate world, Sirius Black is a cubicle guy confined to his prison. There are several coroporate monsters ranging from bureaucracy, politics, bad boss, lack of recognition, etc that suck up a motivation to innovate. The strength is sapped up slowly and a cubicle guy “adjusts” to the life style and the cubicle based corporate lifestyle becomes a routine. The only thing that saved Black was a belief that he was innocent, which in this case, is a belief that he was not meant to be working in a cubicle all his life. He kept his mind healthy with positive thoughts and hopes of escaping and meeting his godson.

This is very similar to the mindset an intrapreneur needs. When I joined the corporate world, I was a naive fresh-out-of-school person. While doing my PhD, I used to get a lot of work done very fast. The mantra was focus and hard work. But, when I came here it was a different story. I saw better ways to do things and went about screaming my lungs out of how to improve things. Then, a good friend and well-wisher told me to “get used to this lifestyle” or quit.

I could never get used to this lifestyle. I did not want to. I liked to create solutions and I saw that as my biggest opportunity and started working on a software that has now gone on to create new promise of how we can do things better!

As an intrapreneur, it is important to be persistent and believe in yourself. If you know your goal and have the discipline to work towards it, you will get there.

Slideshare features my presentation

13 hours after I posted “Visual Resume”, Slideshare sent me this mail…

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Hey saranyan!

Your slideshow Visual resume has been featured on the SlideShare homepage by our editorial team.

Cheers,

- the SlideShare team

p.s. Why not blog/twitter this and let the world know about your awesome creation?

_________
Fun times ahead I guess.. . You can check the presentation here at…

If you like it and want to vote for it, you have to visit slideshare. The link is http://www.slideshare.net/saranyan/visual-resume

PS: I have more than 1000 views now…But, very few voted. If you like the presentation, please vote.

World’s Best Presentation Contest

Work life Balance!

Having focus is good, but look around too...

I had a lengthy discussion with one of my colleagues yesterday about achieving a balance in work-life. He told me of a book that he read about a 17-year old who writes letters to all the great CEOs asking them advice on how to be successful. Over 90% of the replies he gets advices him to pay attention to his family. A happy family is happy life.

We all get caught up with future so much that we do not pay attention to present. Bigger future goals does not have to take away smaller pleasures you can get in the present. I realized it too when I was developing the prototype of Chip Leads’ office (the name of the software I developed). I used to work for 10 hours at work, comeback home and work for another 4-6 hours. I am lucky that my wife is very tolerant and patient, but I seriously feel it is not worth it.

The thing is that if we maintain a healthy attitude, a focused approach and smart working method, success will be just around the bend. IMHO, there are two ways to reach that. First way is rushing to the bend without looking around, or reaching the bend fast enough but all the while appreciating the beautiful path you are walking on or the beautiful person you are walking with…

Please spread the word…

Being ready with TMP (Three minute punch)

My original time slot for demoing the prototype was 20 minutes. I was sure of nailing down the presentation and demo in that time. However, surprise surprise! I got 10 minutes at the end.

Elevator pitches are common in the entrepreneurship community. This is one thing every entrepreneur is advised to practice. The idea is to impress the listener in about 30 seconds.

While it is not required to be that strict here, I think every presentation (to decision makers) must start with an elevator pitch of 3 minutes. In this three minutes, you should awe them with your talk and then demonstrate your prototype or product idea or beta versions…This I call TMP (Three minute punch)

When you get to talk to the VPs or on their schedule, firstly it means that your work is big and sexy enough to warrant their time. Now this itself puts you in a dominant position. Your TMP can take advantage of this fact and start with the most bold opening statement you can make!

Consider the following statement:

“Thanks for your time. Today, I am going to show you how we have solved the _foo_bar_ problem everybody in our organization is talking about. Not only have we solved it, but we have reduced it to practice and created methodologies for everybody to adopt this in their projects”.

The above is one of the boldest statements you can make. The more everyone in your organization is scratching their heads over the _foo_bar_ problem, the more powerful the above statement is going to be for you. This will make your audience (in this case, upper management) open their ears, lean forward, stop checking email and pay attention to you.

Your TMP does not need to contain background of the problem. Everybody knows it and hence, you can skip it. If nobody knows about this problem, you are not even going to be there presenting before your VP. Instead, build it up…restate the biggest challenges and emphasize that you have solved them. This creates a curiosity or the “how factor”. Then give a demo. This nails down your point.

This is just one way..There might be several others. I would love to hear them from you.

Spread the word around…

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Meeting with the VP

Last week, I had a meeting with one of the VPs to demonstrate the prototype I have been working on from the past several months.

The presentation went better than I had planned for (considering that I only got 10 minutes instead of the originally planned 20). That brings me to another point – “It is important to always be ready with elevator pitches“. You never know how much time you are going to eventually get.